90% of world transportation of goods is being done by nautical vessels. Most of it is by ocean going ships which burn a massive amounts low grade bunker fuel. This fuel is the least expensive, but most polluting petroleum product available. On an annual basis, the fifteen (15) largest transportation ships are responsible for as much pollution as the worldwide fleet of 780 million cars. The 90,000 nautical vessels over 150 meters long currently operating burn more than eighty-five (85%) percent of the oil exports of Saudi Arabia, the world's largest oil exporter, daily. It has been estimated that more than 60,000 deaths occur each year of illnesses caused by pollutants generated by maritime shipping. It is thus very important to reduce this exorbitant consumption in any possible way.
Although more efficient engines and methods to reduce their emissions are being implemented on newly built ships, the ships already in use generally will not be upgraded before being retired from service. Mitsubishi Heavy Industries has designed and is building a new type of ship using an air lubrication system termed “MALS”, which reduces drag and reduces fuel consumption by about seven (7%) percent. They use powerful fans that pressurize air to be released as air bubbles under the hull and thus lower the frictional resistance. The problem is that the fans consume energy and still cannot generally push air deeper than five (5) meters. Therefore, they built a new class of vessels with shallow drafts that can employ this lubrication technology. They are flooded with orders for these new boats, but it takes time to build them and the already in use boats cannot benefit since most of the carriers have bigger drafts. A compressor that can generate large volumes of air at a pressure sufficient to overcome the static pressure at the bottom of the vessels is needed.
While the U.S. Pat. No. 8,763,547 authored by Dan Costas and Alexander Costas offers a solution for such a compressor, this compressor has to be custom built for each vessel. For this a dry dock is needed and that makes it for a long and expensive installation dramatically reducing the number of boats that can be upgraded in a year. A modular compressor that can be built, transported, and dropped on to a boat to supply compressed air for an air bubble distribution system that can also be attached on boats without need for a dry dock would be desirable because a large number of boats can be outfitted each year contributing significantly to the fuel economy and pollution reduction. While the bubble generation for ship lubrication is one of the applications, this type of compressor once proven its efficiency can be used for any other unrelated application in any market sector.